Explanation: The Soviet Union under Stalin was very careful about who it let in and out, especially with regards to journalists. As such, it cultivated a comfortable coterie of lickspittles and careerists looking to get the first (or only) scoop on Russian news it allowed to favorably report on the Glorious Worker’s Democracy of the Soviet Union. The majority of the comfortable ‘journalists’ in Moscow were conspicuously silent about the Holodomor, even as it became increasingly apparent, by various dissenters, that there was an ongoing famine, and that it was very likely manmade.

In the modern day, it is widely considered that the famine was an attempt at genocide.